Thursday, 5 April 2012

Days 2 & 3

No posts yesterday. Too much happening in head and body. A rebellion of mind and body in the morning. Making sounds and opening and closing different parts of the vocal apparatus was fine. Placing the mind in a raised arm and then withdrawing it, was fine. And the exercises that were hard and confusing on Tuesday were easier yesterday. Kristin asked us to call right across the loch and this turned out to be, for me, muscularly impossible. A big muscular 'no way, Jose', which of course originates in the mind. Now, up to this point I'd been very deliberately willing to try every exercise and see where it took me. Over the last three days most of us have baulked at some point or other. At that point it's amazing how quick you feel like a. you've been left behind and b. everyone else is a different species. Very childlike fears. I bolted for my Cube and bit raw mushrooms in half and dipped them in salt and alternated dark chocolate with salt-grained cheddar and drank tea and went to bed for 3/4 of an hour and collected some subconscious chatter. More about that another time. We're all at a very different place today, and where my body and I are today is nowhere they've been before. Kristin is an extraordinary tutor. We're all wondering if we can retain this information, if we can take what we've learnt away from here. You know what it's like when everyday life reasserts itself.

Homes from Home

Shetland Stuff

For the past eight years, Shetland has persistently influenced my poetry and visual art.Since my second book Nigh-No-Place, won the T.S.Eliot Award in 2008, I’ve worked primarily as a poet, creative writing tutor, and classroom assistant, but walking, and gathering wild food and materials for my visual art-works, are as important in my creative life as my language-based practice. My third poetry collection, Byssus, is out now.